I hope you’ll forgive me if I depart from my usual
light-hearted silliness to tell you about our recent trip to Ventura,
California, to attend a dog show with our dog, Nash, or, as I refer to him
around the kennel, Fuzzbutt. He’s a
Bouvier des Flandres, a herding dog, and the show was the National Specialty
for the breed.
We drove down in our pickup, with Nash ensconced in the
back of the extended cab and the various crates, cart and gear in the back in
two big tubs, all secured with straps and cargo nets. We got to go over the famous Grapevine for
the first time, as we drove I-5 all the way down, where we were reminded once
again how much of the food we eat comes from giant operations up and down the
central California valleys. Our
destination was a fancy hotel right on the beach, within walking distance from
the Ventura County Fairgrounds to the north.
Our room was on the 4th floor, overlooking a plaza between
the hotel and the public parking garage on the south side with the famous
Ventura Pier just beyond that.
We spent a lot of time going back and forth from the hotel
to the fairgrounds every day to attend and participate in the competitions,
where Nash finished his Rally Novice certification and got his title to add to
his Grand Champion status, though he got skunked in the conformation events,
not too surprising given that the top 100 Bouviers in the country were all
there.
But the thing that got to me, both on the way down and back
and while we were there, was the obvious reality that, everywhere in our
country these days, our society is coming apart, and an increasingly large
number of people are falling off the ladder to success with nowhere else to go
but in public places, where they fester and take root and cause problems.
You can tell them by their walk. A homeless, hopeless person takes life one
step at a time, there’s no hurry, because there’s nowhere to go, and any place
is just as good as any other. Perhaps it
was so jarring because, on the beach in Southern California, at least, the
weather is so good that the poor folks are unlikely to freeze to death. I could look out upon the scene from the
safety of my lanai, and watch the well-fed, well-dressed guests enter and exit
the side door from the hotel, where their magic plastic card electronically
opened all doors for them as they strolled to and from the restaurants on the
plaza or their valet-parked cars, past the beggars and the buskers and the
young couples lost in the glamour of living on the beach, or out of shopping
carts stolen from the local grocery.
I looked out one night, across to the top floor of the
parking garage, and witnessed a single individual man, complete with microphone
in hand, but lacking any amplification equipment, go through a long, complex
rap performance for an audience of none, complete with stage gestures, leaps,
and dives into an imaginary mosh pit, which only came to an end when the local
drug dealer showed up on the rooftop and handed him something that eased his
pain, if only for the night.
Down on the concrete boardwalk that stretches along the
beach from the Pier to the Fairgrounds there was a bearded young man in filthy
clothing, with his bedroll held loosely over his shoulder, engaged in a furious
conversation, with the gestures and facial expressions of one who is ready to
explode, with the air around him. People
instinctively gave him a wide berth as they walked by with their expensive dogs,
on leashes, in their designer jeans and sunglasses.
I rose early in the morning on one day and watched the
police arrest a man who had apparently committed the sin of spending the night
on a bench on the boardwalk, where they handcuffed him on the ground as they
spread his entire life’s possessions on the bench from which they evicted him
before they transported him to whatever lockup awaited. I noticed that the county employed several
full-time security people who patrolled on bicycles with radios on their belts
in case they needed the police in a hurry.
And the road past the front of the hotel was often thick
with Escalades, and Teslas, and in town the restaurant we favored featured 101
taps with different micro-brews flowing from each on command, while in the
morning on a walk through the downtown core I saw people sleeping in doorways
of shops that had yet to open.
This is the face of income inequity in this country, and
it’s clear that it spreads across the nation, like a blanket of misery that
overlays everything, where there are getting to be so many people in dire
straits that we don’t have any places left for them to hide. I have read the words of Steinbeck and others
who told stories about the last time we went through this, but back in the ‘30s
we were all in the same boat, and nowadays it seems like most of us are doing
fine, and then there’s all those people on the beach.
We hear politicians carrying on about immigrants taking our
jobs, yet all the people lined up in the cabbage fields behind the
tractor-pulled harvesters looked like immigrants to me. We saw multiple double trailer rigs filled
with Roma tomatoes and limes on the highways, and the almond trees were being
shaken down for their bounty, which was scooped up with special sweepers that
rolled up and down each row. Somehow,
none of that bounty winds up in local food banks, which mostly feed poor people
a steady diet of carbohydrates and sugar, leftover pastries from the grocery
stores that are past their pull dates but so well preserved they will rot teeth
for months afterwards.
There are a few miles of beach to the north of Ventura
where you can rent a spot to park your motor home for a nominal fee, and it’s
pretty clear that many, if not most of them, have been there unmoved for quite
some time. It’s only the clean ones that
belong to tourists. The others are home
for someone, just like the ones you see in downtown Seattle, and anywhere else
you want to look. And when they break
down, and get impounded, another family hits the street.
I wish I had a glib, plausible answer for all this, but I
don’t. Maybe, like China has apparently
done, part of the solution lies in a guaranteed annual income for all
citizens. Maybe, like in Canada and most
other advanced countries, a single-payer health care system for everyone,
including mental health care for all the bearded young men with their worldly
possessions in a bag on their shoulder who can’t find their way home, would fix
some of the problems.
Maybe if we realized, as a nation, that as long as the
poorest residents of the favelas of Rio or the slums of New Delhi, not to
mention those who live among us already, do not enjoy a minimum of safety and
security, then none of us will ultimately be truly safe and secure. We really are all in this life together, and
the sooner we act on that reality the better off we will be. :-{)}
